Covid-19: International Response

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

This pandemic presents huge challenges to societies everywhere, and virtually every nation in the world has passed emergency legislation to limit freedoms and create social distancing and quarantine. However, steps taken should be proportionate and time limited, and the problem is that this contagion coincides with another contagion: the rise of populism and authoritarianism. I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and we are hearing the most appalling accounts and evidence of abuse worldwide. Under the flag of the pandemic, the escalation of human rights abuse is truly alarming, and in some cases horrifying. Are opportunities being taken by the Government to raise human rights abuses?

Everywhere, women face a terrifying increase in domestic violence and murder. In the Middle East, in India and Pakistan, and globally, women are harassed and victimised on social media. They are seeing their children abducted, and marriages forced on girls. In Poland, under the cover of Covid, abortion rights have been removed. The same is going on in parts of the United States. Police and military forces are using the virus as a pretext for rounding up dissidents. They use it to abuse minorities, LGBT people and those whose religion is not the dominant one. Thousands are in detention in El Salvador. In Kazakhstan, there has been a rounding up of people. In the Philippines, Duterte has given instructions to shoot dead anyone breaking the lockdown rules. Throughout India, the opportunity to turn on Muslims has been seized, and we know what has been happening to the Rohingya and the Uighur in China. I am afraid that the pandemic is accelerating the horrors that they are experiencing. In Kashmir, restrictive laws are being enforced in cruel and shocking ways, and the internet lockdown enforced by Modi means that people do not even know how to access help if they are ill.

Journalists are being targeted. In the USA, Trump has declared openly that asylum seekers are to be barred any opportunity to seek sanctuary, even if they are being persecuted. There has been a total dismissal of the international standards that we have been working towards over many years since the Second World War. The list of egregious conduct is long. I sincerely hope that the Government take every opportunity in raising this behaviour in their international interactions. We must remember that silence makes us complicit. In future efforts to secure post-Brexit trade deals, I hope that this behaviour is not forgotten. It should not be buried with the dead.